[Python-3000] python-safethread project status

[Greg Ewing]

Adam Olsen wrote:
> Killing threads at arbitrary points really is that dangerous.

I'm not talking about killing an arbitrary thread, but
a particular thread that I've designed with the idea of
killing it in mind.

And I'm not really talking about killing it, either,
just having a way of tapping it on the shoulder and
getting its attention whatever it happens to be doing.

I don't believe that's an outrageously unreasonable
thing to want to be able to do.

To be precise, what I have in mind is this:

1) A way of causing an exception to be raised asynchronously
    in another thread.

2) Such exceptions would be automatically blocked in
    a finally clause.

3) There would be a way of explicitly blocking them
    around a section of code, e.g. using a context manager.

4) If it makes anyone feel any better, they could be
    blocked by default until explicitly enabled by the
    thread concerned.

5) When a thread dies, either:

    a) Any locks it is holding are automatically released,
       or

    b) An exception is raised in the main thread if it dies
       while holding any locks (since this indicates a programming
       error, i.e. the thread failed to clean up after itself
       when receiving an asynchronous exception).

Can anyone point to a reason it would be difficult to write
well-behaved threaded code in the presence of these features?

-- 
Greg